Teenagers nowadays are on the computer or watching TV more and more. According to a recent study, teens have an average of about 30 hours of screen time a week. That's around 4 hours and 17 minutes a day! But is all this time in front of computers and TVs harmful? You decide.
A long time ago, before all the modernizing the world has undergone, the people were more in touch with nature. In harmony with nature. They were able to create such beauty, embodied in their architecture, such as the Pantheon, the Taj Mahal, and Chitchen-Itza. Nowadays, when people look at these sculptures, they are awestruck, while buildings today are all boring, square, and dull. They also lived off the land, and the land thrived as a result. They were both beneficial to each other, whereas today, we destroy the land, and waste its natural resources.
There are 2 classes that people fall into, right-brained thinkers, and left-brained thinkers. Left-brained thinkers tend to be more logical, detail oriented, practical, and more realistic and centered on reality. They like concrete facts and usually play it safe. Right-brained thinkers have more feeling, and are big picture oriented, use their imagination a lot, and are interested in philosophy and religion more. They are fantasy based, rely on their instincts and "gut feeling" a lot more, and are usually very impulsive. They are also usually more risk taking than the latter. Scientists call the past 30 years, an age of "Endarkenment," because now, in the 21st century, people have tended to be more right-brained, where it was the opposite before. It is an age in which, according to David Colquhoun, "Has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction." Now we can think, around 30 years ago was the time in which people started to getting really exposed to TV and the Internet, and computers. May this be the cause of humanity's "Endarkenment?"
Teenagers are exposed to lots of violence on TV and in video games, so this influences them badly. There is also the matter of some teens getting highly addicted to certain video or computer games. There have been many stories of people who have had their life ruined, because they dropped out of school or college because of their addiction to video games. One teen in China even had a brain hemorrhage because he played too much of a computer game for an extended period of time.
The Internet and TV exposure that teenagers get can be a good thing, but it must be used in moderation. Too much is bad, but we need to have a little. Different people need different amounts of exposure to TV and the Internet, so it can be hard to strike a balance, but we must try to get as close as we can, for the good of the individual as well as the world.
